Download Berlin Now: The City After the Wall by Peter Schneider, Sophie Schlondorff PDF

A smartly guided romp, interesting and enlightening, through Europe’s most charismatic and enigmatic city

It isn’t Europe’s so much beautiful city, or its oldest. Its structure isn't really extra amazing than that of Rome or Paris; its museums don't carry extra treasures than those in Barcelona or London. And but, while voters of “New York, Tel Aviv, or Rome question me the place I’m from and that i point out the identify Berlin,” writes Peter Schneider, “their eyes immediately mild up.”Berlin Now is an established Berliner’s vibrant, daring, and digressive exploration of the heterogeneous attract of this shiny urban. Delving underneath the most obvious answers—Berlin’s membership scene, strengthened by means of the shortcoming of a compulsory last time; the inventive communities that thrive because of the fairly low (for now) rate of living—Schneider takes us on an insider’s journey of this swiftly metamorphosing city, the place high-class soirees are held at building websites and enterprising contributors usually accomplish extra with out public funding—assembling a makeshift membership at the banks of the Spree River—than Berlin’s officers do. Schneider’s perceptive, witty investigations on every thing from the insidious legacy of suspicion instilled by way of the East German mystery police to the clashing attitudes towards paintings, foodstuff, and love held by means of former East and West Berliners were sharply translated through Sophie Schlondorff. the result's a ebook so vigorous that readers should want to bounce on a plane—just once they’ve entire their adventures at the page.

Concluding the tale of the Luftwaffe s reconnaissance devices, this e-book covers the interval from 1942 to finish of the struggle. because the tide of the battle grew to become opposed to Germany, details received from AufklÃ¤rungsflieger turned ever extra important to either the German excessive Command and local-level floor commanders.

It is a research of the spiritual controversy that broke out with Martin Luther, from the vantage of church estate. the talk ultimately produced a Holy Roman Empire of 2 church buildings. this isn't an fiscal heritage. fairly, the ebook indicates how reputation of confiscation used to be gained, and the way theological suggestion used to be necessary to the good fortune of what's often referred to as a very important if early degree of confessional state-building.

In Modris Eksteins's arms, the interlocking tales of Vincent van Gogh and paintings broker Otto Wacker exhibit the origins of the basic uncertainty that's the hallmark of the fashionable period. in the course of the lens of Wacker's sensational 1932 trial in Berlin for promoting pretend Van Goghs, Eksteins bargains a distinct narrative of Weimar Germany, the increase of Hitler, and the substitute of nineteenth-century certitude with twentieth-century doubt.

The inner compass I had developed while the city was divided automatically guided me and my car along detours to the transit points I had used during the years of the Wall. Again and again, much to my frustration, I would find myself taking the old detours. Nothing seemed more difficult to me than driving straight from west to east. As for the obtuseness of my reflexes, it was only when I happened to see a made-for-TV movie on the Bavarian television network that I finally felt understood. The film captured the baffling behavior of deer on the Bavarian–Czech border.

As it happened, I knew exactly what Siedler was taking about. I had spent a good part of my Berlin life on those nine tennis courts, surrounded by tall poplar trees, just a five-minute walk from my apartment. In the extreme quiet of Mendelsohn’s complex, the tennis players’ serves rang out like shots fired in a civil war, provoking regular complaints from the residents. Not to mention the stridently performed arguments between players over whether a ball was out or had just managed to touch the line.

But the idyllic state of affairs on the Potsdamer Platz wasteland changed—even before the fall of the Wall. The rabbits that had been moving freely back and forth between East and West for years were now joined by new border crossers: in the summer of 1989, Poles started showing up by the Landwehr Canal and near Potsdamer Platz on weekends, bringing souvenirs with them: tools, chinaware, a painting on wood of the Madonna with child. West Berliners, used to dealing with Turkish salespeople, discovered that it’s impossible to haggle with Poles.